Why in the heck is everyone running these drivers now? Please tell me it is not for the silent operation…
Lets just eliminate the 2130’s as I can not see sensorless homing being useful for us. Am I wrong, is it accurate enough to go through the hassle to skip the endstops?
So that brings us to the 2208, okay so max with a fan they are getting 1.2A to drive the steppers. That doesn’t even track with all the people trying to cram nema 23’s and weed wacker motors on the CNC’s. We are running conservatively 1.4A no fan with room to grow with the drv8825’s as is. Most swear they need more power but now everyone is okay with considerably less?
I really want there to be a less expensive board with “digipots” but these skr and gen l’s are not it are they? Am I missing something?
On that note if the Archim firmware gets worked out I really want to drop the rambo’s, buy only Archim’s that might bring the quantity up enough for me get a lower cost and to drop the prices some. At least to Rambo prices if not lower. Still…running 8825’s…
On some boards, like the ramps, they do let you adjust the max current like digipots.
They give you feedback about errors.
Sensorless homing is nice on 3D printers, at least. Less wires.
They seem to drive smoother, not just quieter. I think they do more smoothing between steps and emulate the 1/256 steps of some 32bit boards with 1/16th steps.
Tom said (while he was sponsored) that he thought they would do a little better with the same current max. Hard to trust a sponsored comment and I don’t have a good way to test.
They can be ran cooler, not useful for CNCs, but for printers, you could have a lower current setting for slow moves and more current for higher speed moves. We’d want the opposite, really.
Plus, they are quiet :). They definitely seem more like a strong brushless motor than a cranky old grindy motor. I think it’s mostly psycological, but it has a real feeling of increased quality. I also think lower acceleration limits make a cnc feel like higher quality. It’s not born in logic, it’s emotion.
In my personal experience, I like them a lot of printers. The quiet is enough to sell me and the other features are gravy.
I haven’t tried them on the cnc, but I would guess my favorite feature is them telling me after a job was ruined that the problem was overheating, a wiring problem, or too much torque for the current. That would be worth the $40 or so more for them (I’ve only used the cheap ones).
Hmmm, I watched a ton of videos and read what I could find about them. there are more niche testers out there running them hard and data tracking.
They are pretty complicated and the options do have to be weighed. I have a skr1.3 and uart 2208’s coming, just in case. I suppose I can do a quick and dirty strength test. Offering a less expensive option would be nice, if they are good quality.
“First, the accuracy of the stall detection is good to 1 stop at best and 4 at worst. Assuming the worst case scenario of 4 stops, that’s 1/50mm at our current 200 steps/mm X/Y settings, or less than one thou.”
I am in the process of switching the Rambo board on my Makerfarm 10" Prusa i3v to an SKR V1.3 & the 2208 V3 steppers. I probably should have gotten the 2208 soldered for the uart mode. Those are really small pads to solder together & not sure I could successfully do it. My reason for the change is for smoother prints. I have not found any solution to get rid of the salmon skin on edge of prints & this seems like it might fix it. My current problem is re-crimping the dupont ends to the JST ends. I have 2 done & 3 more to go. I bought a special crimper for it. Seems like someone should have a dupont to JST board converter to make it simpler to change over to newer boards without having to re-crimp everything. Of course that is 2 extra connections on each wire. Seems like all the motor wires I have seen also have dupont connectors on the board end. The motors on my MF are hardwired on the motor end, but it would be nice to find some cables that have the plug connections for the motors & the JST 4 pin connectors for the board. Are there any cables like that out there? I also thought the Rambo board used these same JST connections, but they don’t fit on that board after making these new connections, so no going back now. Why can’t everyone use the same type of connection or at least have some sort of conversion board between them? Ryan, I bet if you made one of these boards you could sell a bunch of them.
I get that they might be a little better suited for 3D printing but not so much CNC. I also might be wrong with the max amperage, some seem to be rated at RMS instead…so 1.2A RMS is actually pretty good I feel.
I am getting the feeling the importing (30% tax) SKR pro and buying 5 genuine 2208 drivers is going to be a very similar price to the Archims. Choosing between Ultimachine and Importing is a no brainier. The downside to me buying in bulk is shipping and import tax, when ya’ll buy one it fits in a E-packet so $1 shipping subsidized by the US gov and no import tax. In the end I rarely get things less expensive that you do when importing.
I did experiment with 2208 v1.1 in UART mode on my printer (with SKR 1.3) and found that it can only work with 16 microsteps for me. Anything finer than 16 will produce layer shifts. 2208s maybe a little quieter than 8825s with 32 microsteps, but does it matter for CNC machine :)?
My ender5 board died this weekend so I put my duet 2 on it. All the connections on the ender were dupont. The duet was all just. Spent hours converting the plugs from one to the other
Anywho, I kept poking around. Turns out there is a 2209, it seems to combine the best of both 2130 and 2208. Then…they even made a 5160 which seems to be a less hot version of the 2209. So 5160 it is (if Marlin is compatible yet).
I do thinks this illustrates a solid issue I have been having with the trinamics from day 1. They are not stable yet. I am sure they are freaking amazing drivers but if every two months the newer better version comes out and it is the same price I am will to wait a bit. Personally I will try something soon, but as a seller of easy to use kits…trinamics are not going to be included anytime soon I wouldn’t think.
Cool info in an easy to find format. Links to the data sheets as well.
Someone had a review on the latest versions, including some higher amperage ones…
I personally really like the einsy board in my 3D printer. It makes it 100x easier to use to have it all in one PCB. If there’s a similar thing in a CNC style board, I would take a look at that, Ryan.
Shoot I wonder why a 32bit board would have any issues with 32-256 micro-stepping. It could be one of the many configurable options in the drivers settings themselves?
That is the crazy part, the skr pro doesn’t need the extra wires (for uart or spi) and it has 6 driver bays so no pin swapping in the firmware for dual firmware. Of course it is preferred to have the driver dissipate into a large copper board but as much as it pains me to say it that skr pro is pretty close and I am seriously considering offering it as an option if I can get a handle on the driver situation and the price is a significant cost savings in the kit.
You don’t need to pin swap a rotational axis would just use the extruder driver. But you would then need CAM for that. Doing an axis swap you can just use regular CAM. Adding axes gets extremely complicated with CAM but has already been possible even on a mini.